The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

Here at Simplified Organization, I like to talk about how organizing your attitude is the most important thing you can organize.

The more we give ourselves the time and activities that build our energy back up, the better we’ll be able to tackle our daily duties with gusto. So here are five ways we can ensure we’re giving and refilling, appropriately and meaningfully.

The day was over. The kids in bed, the house quiet. Time to sigh, breathe deep, and decide how to relax. I glanced down and I caught sight of my daily index card plan I’d made that morning. Ugh. I’d totally forgotten about it after the hubbub of the day had begun. I had begun with such high hopes and ended up feeling like I’d simply held on for dear life. Oh well. I thought. That’s just my season...

Your homeschool needs your personality, and your homeschool has a personality. When we understand homeschool personality , we can be more content and happy in our roles at home. Whether or not you have taken the best personality test or no personality test, you might be able to figure out your type from the brief descriptions below.

The habit of an evening review wraps up your day and brings peace. We often spend a lot of upfront time making a plan, getting it just right, getting the ready for it. And then, when the time comes to put it into place we start strong but quickly fizzle out. It’s easy to think that the problem was a bad plan. But often it’s bad habits, not bad planning. If we want to consistently work our plans, w...

Understanding differences in personality type can drastically reduce conflict and friction in relationships, and this is as true with our children as it is with anyone else.

Try as I might, I cannot escape the reality that having a plan is not good enough. I have to work the plan. It’s painful, but true. In a GTD set-up, the review process, especially the morning review, is the basic component of “work the plan” mode. What is the point in having a list, after all, if you never look at it? The key to making your organization work for you at all isn’t putting into place...

Those of us educating young children tend to use the vocabulary of learning styles, though current research seems to be showing that most of the learning styles rhetoric is bunk .

Regular review is the absolute key to maintaining a sense of organization. You have to look at your lists to make them happen, and that looking over is called a review.

So, I will admit it. I am a personality nerd. I think that understanding MBTI typing makes us better parents, too. Typing people into 4-12 kinds has been going on since Aristotle, and Kiersey (the one who named and described each of Myers-Briggs’ 16 types) makes a compelling argument that the ancient systems (like choleric, melancholic, etc) are observations of the same sort as those made by Isabe...

A weekly review is a common business productivity recommendation, the best tip for how to organize your life , and a practice I encourage in my course Simplified Organization . It is a time to reorient yourself to what you have on your plate and renegotiate your commitments. You take some time and look at your calendar, make fresh to-do lists, decide what your biggest responsibilities are this wee...

Gregory posits not only that review and application are the “essential conditions of all true teaching,” but also that “not to review is to leave the job half done.” The aim of reviewing material is threefold: To perfect knowledge. To confirm knowledge. To render knowledge ready & useful. Reviewing can include a number of different aspects, as well: Review is more than repetition. Review invol...

We have a small practice that saves the state of our house, almost every day. It’s simple and effective – as long as we do it. When I keep the time in the late afternoon regularly carved out for it, I can handle the intermittent chaos that descends as the kids work and play throughout the day. I know order will be restored, so I can take a deep breath and let them strew blankets and play food ever...

What is a teacher? What is teaching? According to Gregory, the art of education — that is, teaching — is two-fold: Teaching is the art of training. Teaching is leading the students into paths of physical, mental, and moral fitness. Teaching is the art of instructing. Teaching stimulates a love of learning and forms habits of independent study. Thus, a successful teacher is working himself out of h...

We moderns tend to compartmentalize our lives, thinking of what we do – and who we are as we do them – as unrelated segments and pieces. So there easily becomes the church me, the hanging-out-with-friends me, the homeschooling mom me, the wife me, the internet me, and the tedious-chores me. What the tedious-chores me thinks and how she behaves seems irrelevant to the wife or hanging-out-with-frien...

This, claims Gregory, is the most widely recognized rule among good teachers. Although there may be times to disregard this law — when time is of the essence, when the child is ill or weak, or when the child is discouraged, for example — however, for the most part, the teacher is to “make [her] pupil a discoverer of truth” — make him find out for himself. The teacher’s role is “awakening and setti...

Many of us are task-driven. We want to see things done, accomplished, finished. This is what the world tells us is productivity. In this view, homemaking 101 would simply be about menial skills.

Gregory begins with a defense of his position that children possess the innate ability to think, which I will simply assume and not summarize. If you aren’t sure if your children are able to think, you’ll have to read that part yourself. The law of the lesson has its reason in the nature of the mind and in the nature of human knowledge. Nature of the Mind — The mind connects thoughts through grade...

If you’re like me, you try – at least occasionally – to become better, more effective, more competent in your roles and responsibilities at home. And then after a period of trying, you peter out because it turns out it’s quite exhausting to grow and change and fight entropy and bad habits.

Gregory speaks in this chapter of language as a vehicle of instruction, an instrument of learning, and a storehouse of knowledge. Briefly, he means that through common language we communicate experience, by speaking we appropriate what we perceive, that without adequate words we cannot think through ideas clearly, and that what we know we will name. Beware, he warns, words with multiple meanings o...

Have you yet discovered Auntie Leila at Like Mother, Like Daughter ? She has a great series called The Reasonably Clean House . I have a weakness for reading articles and blog series that claim it is possible to have at least a semblance of order and cleanliness while homeschooling a brood. Keeping things clean does not come naturally to me, but I cannot shake the idea (try as I might) that it is...

Summary of Law 2: The learner must attend with interest to the material to be learned. A learner – which is what our children are supposed to be – cannot be passive. To become a learner, a child must have two things: interest and attention. Unless and until the child becomes invested with interest and attention to the lesson, the teacher teaches but in vain. One may as well talk to the deaf or to...

Housework seemed like a stupid waste of time. And I hated wastes of time and stupidity, so I triply hated housework. I was torn between wanting to be a good, competent homemaker and thinking that the state of my bedroom or the kitchen just wasn’t a big deal. I could get meals on the table, keep things stocked, and complete a project just fine. But the day-in day-out routine tasks were a drag. I’m...

What is a teacher? What is teaching? According to Gregory, the art of education — that is, teaching — is two-fold: Teaching is the art of training. Teaching is leading the students into paths of physical, mental, and moral fitness. Teaching is the art of instructing. Teaching stimulates a love of learning and forms habits of independent study. Thus, a successful teacher is working himself out of h...

Personally, I always wanted a home to keep. I never wanted a career. I have only ever wanted a home and family to tend. I’ve never questioned that it is worthwhile. Whenever I think of it I am flooded with gratitude that God gave me a husband and home so early, so that I didn’t have to find some random job or feel obligated to pursue a career and ended up as a worker for Denver Concierge’s afforda...